100 New Reactors – Nuclear Waste in Your Town

Nuclear power is the answer to our problems? Maybe. It has a byproduct much worse than oil – isotopes that are radioactive for 1 million years. It’s the answer? Maybe not.

One prospective leader talks about opening 45 new reactors in 20 years and over 100 reactors beyond that. The first question to ask is: Where do we put all this waste? The second question: Is that place going to be safe until the radioactivity is gone?

Right now Yucca Mountain in Las Vegas is a proposed site, but even if approved it’s not infinite. Can we store it in your town?

Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said on 06/03/08 that he’s confident the government’s license application to build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada will “stand up to any challenge anywhere.”

Even:“I don’t have a clue when these programs were installed. So I’ve made up the dates and names,” wrote a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) employee.

Even though:The application that was turned in is missing documentation showing that its safe for the mandatory time-frame?

Bush administration files nuclear dump application

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a vocal opponent, said in a statement he and other Nevada lawmakers “will continue working … to kill the dump” which most Nevada’s don’t want in their state. In recent years Congress has repeatedly cut Yucca project funding in part because of Reid’s strong opposition.

A truck delivered tens of thousands of pages of documents to the NRC’s office in Rockville, Md., earlier in the day. But a key document is missing. The application prepared for the NRC still lacks a final public radiation exposure standard that establishes how protectivethe facility must be from radiation leakage. A federal court said [the EPA] must establish a standard shown to be protective for up to 1 million years—the time some of the isotopes in the waste will remain dangerous. The EPA has yet to produce that document. Bodman said he didn’t think that was a problem.

E-MAIL SUGGESTS FAKE DATA SUPPORTED NUCLEAR DUMP

Article ID: 0504050286
Published on April 2, 2005, San Jose Mercury News (CA)

Excerpts:

E-mails by several government scientists on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump project suggest workers were planning to fabricate records and manipulate results to ensure outcomes that would help the project move forward.

“I don’t have a clue when these programs were installed. So I’ve made up the dates and names,” wrote a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) employee in one e-mail release Friday by a congressional committee…”This is as good as it is going to get. If they need more proof, I will be happy to make up more stuff.”